The present invention relates to the field of screen printing and more particularly to the field of commercial screen printing wherein multiple prints of the same image are applied to garments such as team or fan wear. More particularly, the present invention relates to an improvement in the screen printing platen assembly used in printing multiple garments with the same image. Specifically, the present invention relates to a platen assembly that allows the press operator to position two garments or garment portions for simultaneous printing on the platen and to orient the platen to print on garment portions in different directions.
Printing on T-shirts, jerseys, sweatshirts and other articles of clothing is now common and many manufacturers of garments for the public and for athletic teams routinely use screen printing to place the team logo, name and other specialized indicia on the garment. As trends develop the location and orientation of the image to be printed changes and becomes more challenging. For example, there is now a demand for printing along the legs of sweat pants, down the side strip of shorts, across the yoke of shirts and innumerable other locations and orientations on garments.
Such images are routinely being printed directly onto articles of clothing. In common use in the industry in printing directly onto garments are multi-station, turret type, printing presses. The printing press of this type has a plurality of flat beds or platens spaced along its perimeter. Corresponding to each of these beds may be a series of stations where a part of the indicia is alternately printed and cured. The number of stations employed depends on the number of colors to be printed on the article. In the past, a limitation on the efficiency of the press as a whole has been the ability and speed of the operator in loading a garment on the platen at the initial station and the number of passes through that station or a duplicate station that were required to finish the process.
To print onto the article, it is placed on the platen by the operator with the surface to be printed face up. If the article is a T-shirt, it is slipped over the bed such that the surface to be printed is on the top of the bed. Once printed with the first color, the article must not move or it will be out of registration with the other stations which print the remaining colors. At the initial station of the typical printing press, the article is printed on the flat bed or platen. The bed is typically made of metal such as aluminum or stainless steel. A preformed stencil screen embodying the image to be printed has openings where ink of a particular color is to be deposited onto the article to be printed.
The stencil screen forming the image is placed over the article. Ink of one color conventionally flooded onto the screen. After the ink is flooded onto the screen, the ink is forced through the screen by a squeegee onto the article leaving ink of the desired color where the openings in the screen allowed passage. The squeegee is of any type well-known in the art.
After the excess ink is squeegeed from the screen, the turret type machine is rotated to allow the platen containing the printed clothing to index to the next station where the ink is then dried or cured onto the substrate. Depending on the type of ink used, the ink is either cured on the article by heating it to a critical temperature, or simply by letting it dry if ink containing solvents is used. The platens used in conventional turret machines are sized to fit the body of a shirt such that the printing area is maximized. However, often the image to be printed is not to be placed on the center of the shirt thus the garment must be manipulated by the operator. Likewise, some printing operations are performed on garment portions prior to sewing the garment together, accordingly the operator must often place the individual garment portions in precise alignment on the platen to attempt matching the positions of the images.
It is the object of the present invention to enable the screen print operator to quickly and accurately position a garment or garment portion on a platen for subsequent screen print operations.
It is another object of the invention to enable the screen print operator to print on multiple garments or portions of garments in a simultaneous operation wherein a plurality of images are formed at once.
It is a still further object of the invention to improve the efficiency of the screen printing process by simplifying the procedures required to print on and form a garment.
These and other objects and features of the invention are accomplished through the use of a bifurcated platen mounted on a base pivotally attached for repositioning in each work station as required. The bifurcated platen has two elongated platen members spaced apart from each other and sized to receive either sleeves of garments or legs of garments. A post depending from each member is connected to a pivotally mounted base member such that both members are translated with the base about a vertical axis. A supplemental platen may be attached to over lie the bifurcated platen for conventional printing.